RAID 5 Multiple Hard-drives failure

[Andrew Lennon]

I had a similar thing happen to me a month or so ago.  I was using
seagate (sata250GB) drives and found I was getting many singular
errors which then spread to multiple drives within a matter of hours. 
I was left in the situation where one drive had physically failed, and
one was left corrupted.  Out of the six drives, two were dead
according to mdadm so I thought I was stuffed.

I would strongly recommend trying mhdd and running the remap function.
 This allowed me to get the supposedly dead drive back (run it a few
times, and yes I did pop the drive in the freezer for 30 minutes
beforehand!).  I was then able to bring that drive up as good and
reassemble.  I then bought more drives and now rsync backup to another
machine!

My problem was actually to do with having 4x1GB of RAM, with two
sticks not fully matched.  I have since tested all of my RAM and have
to run it at a lower spec.  I would recommend running memtest+ test 5
on each stick and building up combinations from there.

The same drives are now working flawlessly.

Regs,

Andy

On 3/14/06, Reuben D. Budiardja <techlist at pathfinder.phys.utk.edu> wrote:
>
> Hello,
> First, I apologize if this is rather OT.
>
> I had multiple hard-drives failure yesterday on a RAID 5 array. Two out of
> three drives died almost at the same time, rendering the RAID array useless.
> I tried to recover by doing --assembly and even --assembly --force but it
> failed. The raid device /dev/md0 run with damaged fail system after that, and
> fsck would not fixed it, and message scrolled on the screen and log files
> indicating that writing to the two drives were really failed. SMART reported
> the same thing. So I lost all data.
>
> There is a very very small probabilities that something like this can happen.
> However, in the last two years, I've had a strings of bad luck with these
> hard drives: all Maxtor DiamondMax 250 GB IDE HD. In the last two years, I
> had 4 drives failure with these drives (including the ones yesterday). The
> two failures in the past, I had a replacement drives sent for both of them
> since they were under warranty and it indicated a fail drive with Maxtor's
> diagnostic software.
>
> I am using these consumer level drives thinking that I could build a rather
> cheap backup system. The machine, running RAID 5, did backup for some
> machines in the network using rsnapshot, twice a day. The size of data being
> backed-up is about 250~300GB. The hard drives is on a Promise controller
> running software RAID 5
>
> So my questions having said all that, is there any thing else other than a
> real hard-drive problem that would cause something like this ?
> In other words, could the problem be in the controller, motherboard, etc other
> than the hard drive itself that would cause hard-drives to fail like that ?
> Or is it just Maxtor makes bad drives ?
> Or is a consumer level hard-drive just cannot be used for this kind of work
>
> I am hoping for comments, etc. Thank you in advance.
>
> RDB
> --
> Reuben D. Budiardja
> Dept. Physics and Astronomy
> University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
>
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